DON'T FEED THE ALLIGATORS!
Can we actually do things that make a difference? Here's an easy one to start with.
Talking with a friend a year or so ago about the effects of corporate greed on our culture, I was momentarily befuddled by his comment. "But we need those big corporations. Where would we be if Microsoft hadn't invented Windows?" Being a Mac user, it took me a minute. "Oh, you mean the graphic user interface instead of having to remember and type in all of the DOS commands?" "Yes, of course."
Well, Microsoft didn't invent the graphic interface. The two guys that started Apple Computers did, making possible use of computers by real people. Or was it IBM? Microsoft only got away with breaking Apple's patents.
Microsoft software is used on most computers. With more than 400 million users worldwide, Microsoft Office sales account for somewhere around $1 billion a year. That's a lot of money for a bunch of 99¢ CDs or downloads of a product virtually unchanged for many years, and with a lot of problems.
Going Beyond "No Child Left Behind"
The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was originally adopted in 1965, as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s “war on poverty.” It was intended to provide resources to improve education in poor communities, to equalize educational opportunities and (significantly though less obviously) to provide more skilled workers to the labor market.
The law needed to be reauthorized by Congress every five years, and as this has taken place periodically, ESEA has been considerably amended, reflecting the changing political realities of the last forty years. In 2002, the Bush administration persuaded Congress to infuse ESEA with the draconian standards-and-testing agenda of “No Child Left Behind.” Although it still promised to “close the gap” between the privileged and the impoverished (and hence won broad political support), NCLB represented a massive consolidation of federal control over the content and process of public education, as well as a powerful endorsement of conservative educational ideology.
By dictating that schools must demonstrate “adequate yearly progress” as measured solely by standardized test scores, NCLB effectively saddled the schools with a pedagogy of “transmission”--the authoritative transfer of approved knowledge.
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The Oneness Movement
by Barbara Bottner and C. Montana
“Joy is our natural state,” says Rohanna Salom, doctor of Oriental Medicine in Valley Village, California. “But we seem to have forgotten our true nature.”
Of all the 21 st century organizations working to heal this condition, one of the newest and largest is undoubtedly the Oneness Movement, started in Chennai, India in 1991 by twin avatars Sri Bhagavan and Sri Amma. The declared intent of the Oneness Movement is to uplift humanity’s consciousness from a state of chronic separation and suffering into a state of enlightenment - the awareness of wholeness and oneness – mainly through an energy transmission process called the Oneness Blessing or Oneness Deeksha. Currently acknowledged as teachers and bringers of enlightenment and god-realization by more than 20 million adherents around the world, Sri Bhagavan and Sri Amma’s goal is to bring enlightenment to a minimum of 64,000 people worldwide by the year 2012.
Discovery of self – inner city kids reframe their identity
by Cathy Ellis
MINNEAPOLIS, MN – Life changed for 12 year-old Careino Gurley the day Jane Barrash, now director of The Continuum Center, walked into his classroom in 1991. Placed in Harrison Secondary in north Minneapolis, a school for seriously emotionally and behaviorally disordered kids at the bottom 3% of state scholastic performance, Gurley, like every other kid in the room, had slid down the academic rungs to the last place the system would manage him.
Primarily kids of color, all the students at Harrison had been kicked out of treatment centers, other schools or hospitals. They represented the full range of problems coming from the inner city: poverty, domestic dysfunction, illiteracy, drug addiction, alcoholism and crime.
To say Barrash was met with disbelief when she started talking about how science shows humans are connected at the subatomic levels, and how thoughts and emotions and attitudes are connected to results in life, is an understatement. “They called me ‘Crazy Lady’ at first,” says Barrash. “But after about three weeks they were intrigued.”
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